Living Without Oil

A World Without Oil by Mark Flanighan

As we get to the nitty gritty of the financial world and the recent credit crunch, there is the question of why we rely so much on oil to determine our economy and our quality of life.

The UK for instance now has reduced oil production as reserves drop and are harder to get hold of, so they move more and more to buy from external sources such as Russia. As the oil price increases, then so does everything else, from the food we eat to the holidays we may have wanted to take. As everything becomes more expensive due to higher oil prices, less non-essential products and services are bought, jobs are lost and the cycle continues.

What surprises me, is that no politician I know, has included a no-oil country as part of its policy. Lets put it this way, if the UK is not reliant on oil prices, then life would not be so expensive at the moment, but so would the health service be cheaper to run, giving the opportunity to treat more patients better and quicker, the police force would be cheaper also, allowing us to catch and prosecute more criminals. Not forgetting education as the third main election winner, imagining you could reduce the cost of the education system, as materials, transport, and heating and not reliant on the price of oil.

This is not a tree hugging suggestion but a realistic one, to find alternative forms of energy that are not dirtied by men in suits in an office somewhere else in the world not for ozone layers or greenhouse gasses but just to have a more stable economy.

If you take the mobile phone industry over the last 15 years and measure the difference in size of batteries and power output over this time, you can see huge changes that were all driven by the demand for smaller cheaper and better mobile phones.

Supposing this aggressive demand for technology was applied to solar energy or wind energy, is it possible that in 15 years time, we could have solar panels only a quarter of the size delivering 4 times the power, or wind turbines a quarter the size delivering many times the energy we can get now. This is not a pipedream, but something that with the right amount of focus and determination to achieve, could happen.

The ironic thing is that politicians could attack the main financial issues of any political campaign with this evolution in technology. Everything that this administration would be in charge of would become less expensive to achieve and of course we would be doing something to save the earth as well, although this argument is mainly a financial one.

Is it possible that the oil companies like controlling the financial future of the world? It is true that certain countries will kill to own any oil reserve because of the riches it will bestow upon them. But can you imagine a country that did not need any oil to transport its people or move it's products around, there certainly would be a benefit at the moment.

Mark is webmaster for UK Finance and Financial News

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